From: Doug Brewer
Tom C wrote:
> Hi Doug, (take everything I say as not an argument, but more or less musing)
>
> I don't know the history of Eggleston or how/why he became famous.
>>From the exhibit I saw, I suspect either some beatniks in a coffehouse
> somewhere or some art professors who talk vs. do, were looking for
> deeper meaning and stared at some photographs long enough until they
> thought that they'd found it. Realizing he could achieve fame and/or
> money by doing more of the same he set out to deliver what the
> 'intellectuals' wanted.
You're going to play the populist card?
If it weren't for Eggleston, Stephen Shore, and Joel Meyerowitz, and
their pioneering color work, we'd probably all still be out looking for
Saint Ansel's tripod marks and f/64ing the hell out of our monochrome
emulsions, because no serious photographer would ever shoot in color.
Are you sure about that? Ansel Adams shot color ... medium format
Kodachrome to be sure, and he's not really famous for that, but still he
was a "serious photographer" and he did shoot in color
Like it or not, critical and curatorial judgment affects what we do.
Maybe, maybe not. It affects what we can SELL. If that's the only thing
you're interested in.
While I would like to have commercial success as a photographer ... to
be "In The Gallery" as Dire Straits put it, that isn't what drove me to
pick up the camera in the first place.
I would like to make some kind of a living from photography, and I hope
the critics and curators will find my work worthy, but my work is shaped
by what *I* find worthy ... the critics and curators can like it or lump
it.
If they don't, I'm still going to continue to pursue my own vision.
Critics and curators don't really produce any body of work, they just
comment on what others have produced.
I expect that, in the main, what photographers and artists DO affects
critical and curatorial judgment far more than what critics and curators
think influences what photographers and artists do.
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